Monkey's Audio

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Monkey’s Audio is a lossless audio compression codec. Unlike lossy formats, such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis, or AAC, Monkey’s Audio does not permanently discard data during compression. A file compressed with Monkey's Audio sounds the same as the original file, no matter how many times it is uncompressed and reencoded. Monkey's Audio can be used for distribution, playback and archival purposes. Monkey's Audio files use the filename extension .ape for audio and .apl for track metadata info.

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Comparisons

When comparing Monkey's Audio against other audio formats, it should be noted that Monkey's Audio is a lossless format, i.e. one which aims to preserve all of the original data. Against other lossless compression formats such as FLAC and Shorten, Monkey's Audio compares well in some departments and less well in others.

Monkey's Audio achieves compression rates of around 55%[1], which is slightly better than FLAC (around 58%) and significantly better than the older Shorten (around 63%). Given this, both encoding and decoding are generally slightly slower than both FLAC and Shorten. It suffers from relatively slow seeking, depending on the compression level chosen, and has no error robustness, so if the file is damaged, any audio data after that point will be lost.

Monkey's Audio has been criticised because it is not Free Software or Open Source. This means that many versions of Linux will not include it and the software ecosystem around Monkey's Audio is less varied than for other more freely licensed lossless compressors such as FLAC. Since FLAC comes pre-installed with most versions of Linux, FLAC is typically preferred by users running that operating system. The older Shorten format has been used for many years in the live taping community. Sites such as Etree typically still use Shorten, though some are beginning to move to FLAC.

Since Monkey's Audio is a lossless compression method, it is not readily comparable with lossy compression methods such as MP3, Ogg Vorbis and AAC. The two different types of format have different aims. The aim of Monkey's Audio is to preserve an exact reproduction of the original file in as small a space as possible. The aim of MP3, for example, is to discard sound data in an intelligent manner so that it fits the amount of space (or bit rate) specified by the user while retaining as much quality as possible.

Since Monkey's Audio preserves the entire quality of the original file, files tend to be significantly larger than lossy compression formats such as MP3. A typical Monkey's Audio file will use around 600 to 700 kilobits per second (kb/s) for CD quality audio. MP3 allows the user to select a bitrate but typical bitrates chosen are 128 to 192 kilobits per second which allow good, but not perfectly identical, quality.

The Hydrogenaudio Wiki features a comparison of Monkey's Audio and other lossless codecs.

Supported platforms

Officially, Monkey's Audio is only available for the Windows operating system. There was some discussion on the Monkey's Audio website about official support for Linux and Mac OS users, though none of this came to fruition. A developer by the name of SuperMMX released an unofficial port in early 2005, which also includes plugins to allow playback using the popular audio players XMMS and Beep Media Player. This port was originally developed for Linux but, since version 3.99 update 4 build 4, it has included support for Mac OS X as well as Linux on the PowerPC and SPARC architectures. However, the future of this unofficial port is quite uncertain since the project has not received official approval from Monkey's Audio's author, something which may be required by the licence under which it is released. Additionally, many Linux distributions will not include the Monkey's Audio software since its licence is neither Free software nor Open source.

See also

External links

Retrieved from "http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Monkey%27s_Audio"

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